On January 7, 2026, after a year of unrelenting attacks by masked state thugs abducting and kidnapping innocent civilians, a woman in Minneapolis did her duty to her people. She involved herself in the struggle against reactionary cruelty, and defended her neighbors by literally putting herself between them and the brutes invading her community. This woman’s name was Renee Nicole Good, and the duty she fulfilled to the people of Minneapolis has been passed down to every person enraged by her murder.
Even as we prepare this statement, another person has been murdered by the state – Alex Pretti, a VA nurse who was performing his obligation to protect life as he put himself between the state’s killers and a woman they were brutalizing. The punishment for his kindness was public and immediate death. Renee and Alex number among many others killed or abducted by the state, whose names, like the deaths counted during the George Floyd protests, become too many to list. We cannot afford to lose one more person to this cruel assault on working people and their loved ones.
These murders are not isolated incidents. This particular campaign of terror began as soon as Trump took office for his second term, leading an administration characterized by white supremacist campaigns of violence and Christian nationalist rhetoric. However, the working classes domestic and abroad have long been subjected to American violence and its cruelty against the most vulnerable. From the centuries-old ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide of indigenous nations, to the enslavement and senseless executions of Black people, the United States has always employed violence and murder to maintain the hegemony of the owning class. Thus, we totally and unconditionally reject the claim made by liberals that extrajudicial killings and terror squads are “un-American” – in many ways, they define America.
We did not get to this point in a vacuum. The past several decades of neoliberalism have produced a society dominated by political apathy and nihilism. In seeing how terrible things have gotten and how much worse they can get, the majority of workers in this country are despondent. Their neighbors, family, and countrymen may number among the most reactionary of the American working class now gleefully ripping families apart in a campaign being compared to the massive deportations carried against Mexicans by Herbert Hoover a century ago. They have no hope for any kind of liberation, and on the best of days have resigned themselves to holding a sign at a protest.
The local and national progressive and socialist organizations forming the backbone of this protest bloc have become, at first glance, the most sensible vehicle for outrage. Unfortunately, the most frequent answer by both progressive and socialist organizations is electoral and legislative reform, appealing to what they believe broad sections of the working class think is familiar or possible, and directing an endless cycle of chanting and marching, as well as vacuous condemnations against “billionaires.” Local government and progressive leadership both, as The Onion dourly puts it, “don’t want to give ICE pretext for what they are already doing.” Who can blame people for despondency? There has never truly been any worthy alternative to dedicate their time, energy, or even money to.
An organization cannot only be active and visible in the struggle, but must also be able to explain how its strategy demanding the time and energy of working class people will achieve revindications. We need a party which understands both the history of the communist movement, with all its implications, victories, and failures, as well as the material conditions today to present a strategy for socialist revolution. We need a party which establishes firm connections with the working class struggle, dedicating its members to the long, hard path of building class-conscious unions and local councils that represent and fight for people on their terms. These are requirements for any party to lead the movement out of the hands of reaction and capital.
C-TCP believes that our coworkers, neighbors, friends, and family must be shaken from their despondency, and shown that the fight for socialism is necessary and attainable. We are building an organization, with strong leadership and an unshakable foundation, to challenge the current order and give all power, all faith, all legitimacy to the working people of this country. We owe it to all those who gave their lives in this struggle, that their deaths were not in vain, and that we will win this war.